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Thanks for your reply - I have posted a number of times and didn't want to tire "gurus" with repeated details.

I have a 1.7 GHz processor, ! GB RAM, a non-booting image of Win XP Pro in 40 GB (half of hd0) with Celena in the other half (including swap and /home). That replaced my original installation of Bianca.

Primary EIDE slave is hd1, 200 GB, with Cassandra in hd1,0; 2 more images of Win XP Pro in hd1,1 and hd1,2 followed by a swap partition.

The secondary EIDE drives are DVDRW and CDROM.

Primary SATA, hd2, is a 500 GB SATA drive with at present a 40 GB NTFS partition used for backups, several vacant unmounted partitions, followed by Daryna in hd2,7, with swap in hd2,8 and /home in hd2,9.

The Windows systems are my principle data repositories, using My Documents in Documents and Settings. I have symbolic links to these on my Desktop screen.

I outlined some of my difficulties and comments in a recent post (in the Feedback & Suggestions forum). I think the topic was something like 'Problems with Daryna' but if I try to look now I shall lose this script! You might be interested in another topic there - 'Can grub learn?'.

I think my 3 on Boot problems speak for themselves. Use of Recovery mode for Daryna followed a number of attempts to boot which "hung" in Gnome with no movement in the progress bar. That behaviour is erratic - this morning, booted first time - yesterday, many failed attempts. Previously, Celena has always booted nicely but yesterday it started misbehaving, producing the "Busybox" screen.

One major problem is that every time I boot Daryna, $ df -h shows that one of the Win XP Pro systems is mounted to 3 /media places, leaving the other 2 unmounted. I have to correct this by a series of sudo commands before I start to use it.

As ever, I shall be most grateful for help and advice. I'm old and slow too - nearly 90!

Sounds like fun. lol I can assure you I am not a "guru." Just an old dumb country boy.

Couple more questions. Why do you have so many swap files? Are you using grub only, or do you have another boot loader in the system, (not counting the native windows boot loader)? Have you formatted or partitioned anything since you installed Mint 4?

You might want to go ahead and download and burn two iso's. You will probably wind up using one or both before it is over with. Go to the puppy linux community site and download Puppy Shard 3.01. This is a live cd that comes in really handy to fix things. The other iso is Supergrub. You can Google it easily. I don't have the url handy. You will be able to boot from this iso to any of the systems, assuming of course if they will boot. It can also come in handy for a quick fix for grub. Be careful what you try to fix with it though. It can/will ruin your gfxgrub install if used improperly.

While we are talking about burning, I hope you burned the cd of Mint 4 slow and checked the md5 sum.

Fred

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and each time expecting a different result.

Democracy is 2 wolves and a lamb voting on the menu. Liberty is an armed lamb protesting the electoral outcome. A Republic negates the need for an armed protest.

When grub is installed with a new version of Linux incorporating a dual-boot facility, it automatically overwrites the Windows, boot file in parftition 0, I understand. This may be related to the triple-mounting of one Windows partition, but this doesn't happen in Celena.

I'm nervous about intervening in the boot process until as a safeguard I've learned how to complete the process started by the grub boot floppy - subject of another post in this group. I'm studying the grub manual, which is currently accessed via a dynamic link - these are very useful!

Well actually I suspect you have several problems. Thats why it seems so confusing. One of those problems is probably due to an UUID issue. There is a good article on the mint wiki explaining the issue.

As far as the booting issue, Thats why I suggested you burn the Supergrub disk.

Believe it or not all my ridiculous questions are leading somewhere. We just arn't there yet.

If you wish to work on the issues on your own a bit I encourage that as a learning experience. If you want me to continue to try to help you at some point be sure to try to remember what you have done. It will make it much easier, if and when that time comes.

Roll on,

Fred

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and each time expecting a different result.

Democracy is 2 wolves and a lamb voting on the menu. Liberty is an armed lamb protesting the electoral outcome. A Republic negates the need for an armed protest.